


no matter how near you'll be (the sad affair remix)

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Codependency, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24331852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Four years after the war, Dick is still dragging Nix out of bars.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 50
Collections: Heavy Artillery Rolling Remix 2020





	no matter how near you'll be (the sad affair remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Loquacious Mr. Liebgott](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218134) by [LT_Aldo_Raine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LT_Aldo_Raine/pseuds/LT_Aldo_Raine). 



> Title from the Andrews Sisters' 1950s hit "I Can Dream, Can't I?"
> 
> Thank you to ThrillingDetectiveTales for reading this over, and for running this delightful fest.

It was only because of Lew's sister that Dick had gone at all.

She'd called him after ten, waking him up, and asked if he could drive over to Manhattan and fish Lew out of some dive bar. Dick had almost argued, almost said Lew's drinking was none of his business, hadn't been for years. He'd almost asked why she cared, when her brother so clearly did not, but the fact that she'd called him answered all of those questions.

Dick dressed, knocked back a coffee, and drove the hour into the city. It gave him too much time to think, so he turned on the radio and listened to music the whole way, forcing his mind still.

He drove by the address twice before he spotted the bar. It had a doorway like it thought it was still under Prohibition, and no real sign. When Dick parked, and went in, uneven stairs almost hobbled him as soon as he stepped in. Cigarette smoke filled the serpentine interior; there was no music save for the growl of voices, and everything reeked of stale booze and urine. Dick had seen Lew in worse places.

At close to midnight on a Tuesday, the crowd was thinning out, but Dick still had to scan the men hunched against the bar for a moment before he picked out familiar sloping shoulders. The hair was what'd thrown him. Dick hadn't actually laid eyes on Lew in two months, and it'd grown out past his collar since then. It'd started to curl, like it always had when it got long. Like it always did when it got long, and started to curl, it incited a desire deep in Dick's gut to bury his hands in it. He'd been allowed to, once.

As he had every other time in the last four years, Dick quashed the desire and started across the bar to haul Lew away and back toward New Jersey, where everyone seemed to think they both belonged. Although, Dick would be damned if he drove all the way out to Lew's place in Princeton. Lew could sleep on Dick's couch, like he had every other time he was too drunk and Dick was too sick and tired to get him anywhere else. Dick would have bought a cot, except his perversity told him that it would be sanctioning those impromptu sleepovers. Or his naive heart thought that maybe this time Lew would ask to share the bed.

Every time, Dick had promised it'd be the last, then made a liar out of himself the next. Lew, at least, had never had a similar illusion.

Dick took a deep breath of mostly stale nicotine spiced with some oxygen, and stepped towards the bar. He left his hat on. He wouldn't be there long enough to warrant taking it off.

"You wanna hear something funny?" Lew slurred just as Dick got close enough to pick out individual voices. Dick stopped, thinking he'd been spotted, but Lew was talking to the man next to him, who was an inch away from being face down on the bar. Lew sensibly didn't bother waiting for an answer before continuing, "The funny thing is, I didn't even notice she'd left me."

"What?" Dick asked, too soft to hear. He'd been reaching over to grab Lew by the collar and pull him towards the door, but now he stayed where he was, listening. If Lew had looked up, he'd have seen the reflection in the smudged mirror behind the bar: Dick hovering behind him, as out of place as a battlefield spirit.

"Who?" Lew's companion asked, but Dick already knew. That would be the second Mrs. Nixon, the certain young lady from Aldbourne, who everyone except Lew seemed to have noticed had one foot out the door for a year now.

"My wife," Lew muttered irritably. "Married for four damn years, and she just up and goes back to England. Left the divorce papers on the kitchen table. As if I'm ever in the kitchen. Housekeeper had to give them to me. Ha." Lew concluded, like that was somehow the funny part. His companion laughed, anyway.

Dick didn't. Had Mrs. Nixon called Lew's sister? Or had Lew done it before he started in?

"She'd been fucking around on me," Lew said, which caught his the attention of the bartender, too, though that part wasn't news to Dick either. He had, at least, suspected. He stood there, looking at Lew's reflected face: the mop of dark curls and two-day beard, hiding downcast eyes and pinched mouth, and tried to see Lew like the stranger saw him, as if this was their first time meeting.

He was still beautiful, Dick thought, but not in the matinee idol way he had been almost a decade before. Lines of life and war and drinking had pulled his face down, softened his jaw, and deepened the bags under his eyes, but for all that, when he smiled—which he was now, telling a stranger the story of the second Mrs. Nixon's departure—he looked like the same old Nix. Dick had used to buck himself up on long freezing nights imagining that he'd grow old next to that face. Same way as Lew had thought about his girl in England.

"Guess she fucked herself all the way back across the Atlantic," Lew said, and the man laughed more at the profanity than at anything about that being funny. "It's okay, though, plenty more fish in the say, right? Got girls lining up for me." Lew finished his whiskey and looked consideringly at the ice cube rattling around the bottom of the glass. "Boys, too," he added, and gave the man a sideways look, seeing how he'd react.

Was he trying to pick this stranger up? Dick looked at the bartender, who'd pointedly drifted away, then at Lew's companion. They were in a dive bar in the Village. Lew's chances of getting taken up on that were somewhat better than his chances of getting punched.

The man responded by falling forward, his face hitting the bar with a thud.

Lew laughed. "Guess not," he muttered, and then turned from the bar, starting to call out, "Hey, anyone in here wanna, oh, hey, Dick!"

"Lewis," Dick said, knowing his voice could have frozen the Hudson, and not caring.

"If I'd known you were coming, I'd have baked you a cake," Lew said, grinning at him. His expression was bleary enough that Dick didn't think he'd worked out that it was unusual for Dick to be in any bar, let alone one in Manhattan in the middle of the night. "Glad you could come." He seemed to think that was funny in some way that he also seemed about to explain.

Dick stepped in and got his shoulder under Lew's armpit levering him off the stool.

"He owe you anything?" Dick asked the bartender, who shook his head. It was a cash on the bar kind of place. "Come on, Nix, let's get you home."

Lew clung to the shoulder of Dick's jacket with one hand, and got a handful of shirt with the other, half standing and half being dragged as Dick headed for the door. "This is good," he said, "see, I was just looking for someone with pretty blue eyes to take me home."

"Yeah, you're a lucky guy," Dick muttered. The stairs were going to be a challenge. He hitched Lew up and closer to his side and took them one at a time.

"Did I tell you she left?" Lew asked on the middle stair, suddenly trying to pull away from Dick so that he could see his expression.

Dick tightened his hold on Lew's belt. "Yeah, I heard," he said shortly.

"Least she didn't take the dog."

"Thank God," Dick muttered. And elbowed the door open before pulling them both out onto the street.

It'd started to rain in the last few minutes, and Dick hadn't cared to look for Lew's hat. Lew turned his face up into it, letting the big drops of the spring shower hit his face and open mouth, expression amazed.

Dick flipped his collar up and got them both headed for the car, which by some miracle was parked only a block away.

"Hey, Dick," Lew said, and maybe the rain had sobered him up a little, because he seemed to realize it actually _was_ Dick there beside him.

"Mmm?"

"I ever tell you that you have pretty blue eyes?"

So much for being sober, Dick thought, and tried to fish though his pocket for the car keys at the same time as he held Lew up. "My eyes are gray," he said.

"No they're not!" Lew sounded appalled at the idea, and again tried to pull away to look Dick in the face, as though he could see anything in the neon-lit street.

Four years ago, Dick would have argued. He'd have kept up a debate with Lew about the color of his own eyes for half an hour, just to hear his voice, and listen to him cut at Dick's pride and try to edge him into a smile and a rebuke. Now, Dick got the passenger door open with one hand, held Lew upright with the other, and didn't say a damn word.

He poured Lew into the passenger seat, crossed to his own side, was pleased to see that no escape attempts had been made, and turned the key. Around when Dick had worked out how the Village's one-way streets could get him back to the tunnel, Lew seemed to work out what was going on. For real, this time.

"Hey, Dick."

"Lew," Dick said again. He thought about turning the radio up to drown Lew out, but couldn't bring himself to it. Lew would probably just yell over the music anyway.

"How'd you know where to find me?"

"Your sister called me."

"Guess you heard about the missus, then, huh?"

Dick finally got back to the tunnel and the light changed as the went underground. He didn't look at Lew. "Heard when you told the whole bar."

Lew snorted instead of answering.

"You told them you were a queer, too," Dick added, trying to find a chink in Lew's indifference.

"Ha, did I? At least I was in the Village."

He almost seemed to be asking for Dick to lecture him about the dangers, even there, about how he could have been recognized, or the bar could have been raided and everyone inside charged with public indecency. Lew seemed to be daring Dick to try to make him give a damn.

Dick was too tired for that. "Yeah, well, I, uh, bailed you out of there before you found someone willing to screw you."

"Thanks," Lew said, and at least Dick had raised some sarcasm above the sea of alcohol and apathy. "Have to pay you back for that."

Glancing sideways, Dick took in Lew's pallid features in the flashes of tunnel lights and approaching headlights. He had his head resting on the back of the seat, his chin tipped up exposing his stubbled throat. Dick had used to like to kiss him there, during the war, and everywhere else, too. He wished a small part of him weren't so damn _happy_ that Lew was getting divorced again, as if that somehow gave Dick the chance he hadn't had back in '45, when Lew had decided to give being a normal man another go. As if Dick would be any more willing to live with Lew than either of the Mrs. Nixons had been.

The truth was that Dick was already looking for a way out of his job at the nitration works, and had been for some time. The truth was, he didn't have a chance, and he knew it. He'd known it for years.

Still, he put his hand on Lew's knee, and said, "I'm sure you'll think of some way to pay me back."

Lew laughed at him, and, for just that moment, Dick's heart lifted.


End file.
